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With so many interactions now reduced to status updates on Facebook or 140-character Twitter bursts, it may seem as though we have this messy human-to-human thing all figured out.

Except we don’t. People in the 21st century are every bit as crude, brutal and self-serving as when cavemen were knocking each other over the head with clubs. The digital realm simply provides a new mask for base behavior, even if that mask looks to be the smiley face of a friend.

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This is the eternal verity that director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin pursue so well and with such delicious irony in The Social Network, a drama about the creation of Facebook. It may be the year’s best movie.

It stars Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, the geeky Harvard student who in 2004 started Facebook in his dorm room, launching a social media revolution and making himself America’s youngest billionaire. Zuckerberg’s zeal also sparked two lawsuits from former friends and business associates, who claimed the baby-faced boffin used, conned and defrauded them.

You might well wonder why Hollywood big leaguers like Fincher (Zodiac, Fight Club) and Sorkin (TV’s The West Wing) would be so fascinated in a nebbishy figure like Zuckerberg, the Peter Pan of the Internet.

Why not instead do a film about real characters like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or the two guys who invented Google? Fincher and Sorkin realized, and the rest of us do upon seeing The Social Network, that Zuckerberg’s transformation from carefree hacker into one of the world’s most avaricious businessmen was a story of Biblical dimensions.

Here’s a man who, as the story goes, gained 500 million Facebook “friends” and yet who sold out the one true pal who believed in him and supported him. Zuckerberg may be the epitome of modern falseness: an artificial friend for a virtual world.

He’s essayed to perfection by Eisenberg, an actor of grace and skill who previously seemed fated to playing only well-meaning nerds in films like Adventureland and Zombieland. His Zuckerberg is a figure of enigmatic malevolence, deeper than he seems but also much darker, as drained of blood as a vampire’s victim.

Eisenberg also brings a nice touch of black humor to the proceedings, expertly delivering the many zingers from Sorkin’s wicked pen and personifying the subterranean rumble that is Trent Reznor’s and Atticus Ross’ soundtrack.

The film also boasts a peak performance by Justin Timberlake, whose real-life alter ego as a pop star more than equips him for the evil clown role of Sean Parker, the co-inventor of Napster. He arrives midway through the film seeming as little more than a party animal and fellow golden geek, but he’s the catalyst for the film’s most shocking act of betrayal.

The reputed treachery victim was Brazilian-born Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg’s closest friend at Harvard and the co-founder of Facebook. A successful businessman even as a student, he staked Zuckerberg for an $18,000 line of credit and was Facebook’s original business manager, before events took a twisted turn.

Played with understated brilliance by Andrew Garfield, who is about to become the new webslinger in a rebooted Spider-Man franchise, Saverin is everything that Zuckerberg isn’t: a gentleman, a popular figure on campus and a ladies’ man.

These qualities also describe twin rowing champs Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by the nimble Armie Hammer), who also allege Zuckerbergian subterfuge. They claim to have thought of Facebook first, along with their friend Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), and they conscripted Zuckerberg to help them create it.

Instead Zuckerberg reportedly went off on his own, misleading his friends and associates about his true intentions until it was too late and lawyers entered the picture. The Social Network adroitly slides between emotional confrontations and bone-dry courtroom procedures, at all times retaining its focus on the fascinating cipher that is Zuckerberg.

Sorkin’s script is based on The Accidental Billionaires, a book by Ben Mezrich that ploughs much of the same turf; Zuckerberg naturally disputes both accounts.

The movie begins with a fictional, although emotionally truthful, barroom encounter between Zuckerberg and his frustrated girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara), who first utters the “a--hole” condemnation that will be amplified and pondered throughout the film. She’s the strongest female in a picture dominated by males and the most visible sign of humanity in the gladiator’s pit of the Facebook wars.

Thirty-four years ago this fall, the buzz was about another media movie, one with just Network for a title. It featured a TV anchorman named Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, who was “mad as hell” about the falseness of society and the loss of human values represented by a plugged-in populace.

Little did Beale realize that no matter how much he wailed, the future world illustrated by The Social Network would continue to make fake attachments while inventing diabolical new connections.

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